


This Time I Won't Forget

by churchenbells



Category: Zeroes Series - Scott Westerfeld
Genre: Angst, Hanahaki Disease, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:40:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28364814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/churchenbells/pseuds/churchenbells
Summary: Agapis pneumonia: Commonly referred to as "lover's lung" or "the fatal fancy", this is a condition of the lung characterised by flowers growing within the air sacs. The bacteria that causes agapis pneumonia can lay dormant for many years until a person experiences unrequited love, at which point flowers will begin to take root in their lungs. Symptoms typically include chest pain, intermittent fevers, shortness of breath, and productive coughs, which produce phlegm and flowers at the beginning of the infection and progress to almost entirely dry flowers. This condition is fatal unless the infected person falls out of love or their love is returned.Thibault is dying.
Relationships: Ethan "Scam" Cooper/Thibault "Anonymous" Durant
Kudos: 8





	This Time I Won't Forget

**Author's Note:**

> Because it's about time we got some classic tropes in here.

_And Ethan didn't want to resist her. Thibault had felt it the second Kelsie stepped through the door: Ethan's sharp, crackling interest. Man, look at that attention he was throwing after her—a big fat cable of electric iridescence. An instant crush._

_Figured. Even after almost two days together, Thibault was nothing compared to a cute girl in a sparkly dress._

That was when it began for Thibault. A persistent cough, short-lived fevers. The tightness in his chest was easily explained away by the stress of having a consistently-forgetful roommate. He had thought nothing of it until the day he coughed up a bright blue petal.

It wasn't true. It couldn't be true. Surely he'd breathed it in outside and coughed it up just now. Then came a second petal and a third, shattering any illusion. Thibault tried not to feel so bitter when he looked over at Kelsie's door.

The disease progressed quickly after the appearance of the first few petals. It could lay dormant for a short period after the initial infatuation—the time during which one could easily fall out of love again—but Thibault knew that once he saw petals, it was only a matter of time until he saw a bloody bouquet.

Thibault saw his first flower during the Dish's opening night.

Kelsie's DJ-ing ensured that Thibault was left undisturbed. Nobody could hear him over the booming drop of the bass. He ducked into an alcove, doubled over and coughing. He'd learned by now that the best way to get the agony over with was to let gravity help pry out the traitorous leaves from his throat. The petals were so _small_ , but Thibault still couldn't breathe. His vision began to go dark at the edges and he could feel his ears burning from the blood rushing to his head. Spit dribbled uselessly past his lips and on the floor. And still the flower didn't show.

Thibault could feel it _fluttering_ in his throat with every weak—growing weaker and more ragged by the second—inhale. It finally caught in his throat and he gagged. The flower was vomited out more than anything.

It lay plastered to the floor of the Petri Dish by Thibault's spit and tears. Once his vision cleared, Thibault could see it for what it was. The flower lay there, taunting him with how perfect and unrumpled it still looked after the violent battle he'd just fought with it. A forget-me-not. _Of course._

Researchers would tell you that the flower you coughed up had no particular symbolic meaning, that it was nothing more than a flower you'd encountered at some point in your life that your body had learned to reproduce in your lungs. It was the Victorians, with their obsessive need to categorise the natural world, who'd connected a person's flowers to some aspect of their unrequited love. But anyone who actually bothered to do their research on agapis pneumonia knew that the flowers didn't mean anything.

Of course, Thibault, staring at a perfect forget-me-not, was suddenly much more inclined to agree with the Victorians. _Forget me not_ , he thought wryly, _It's already too late for that_.

The next few parties at the Petri Dish featured a bouncer who kept hiding in the alley to cough up flowers he stashed in the dumpster. No way to connect them to Thibault. He'd then return to the dance floor and do his best to avoid Ethan, who, having finished his one job, would spend the rest of the Dish's show nights looking for Thibault. When he could remember him. It was probably kind of sad that Thibault had grown to recognise the barely-there thread of Ethan's attention from across a frothing nightclub. Ethan had a lot of trouble remembering what he was looking for when faced with the distractions of the Petri Dish, but he somehow always had a thread, spindly and wavering it may be, reserved for Thibault.

That shimmering thread was like a knife in Thibault's heart. Especially when it was soon followed by the stronger lines connecting Ethan to the Zeroes and, yes, a blazing cable of attraction from Ethan to Kelsie. It was easier for Thibault to avoid Ethan altogether than it was to deal with the fact that anything he could get from Ethan wouldn't equal half what Kelsie got without even wanting it. He was good at it—he wouldn't be much of an Anonymous if he wasn't—and soon Ethan was all but absent from Thibault's life. Which only made the coughing worse. Cleaning supplies and stain remover soon joined the glass of water for when Thibault woke up coughing up blood with his leaves and stems and disgusting, disgusting flowers.

Sometimes, when meditation failed him and Thibault succumbed to anger, he wished his coughing would wake Kelsie. On days when the pain was worse than usual, he wanted to grab a bunch of the flowers and shove them in Ethan's face, force him to smell the saccharine perfume of death. Force him to smell what was happening to Thibault.

There wasn't much of a smell to Thibault's flowers, though. They were small, perfumeless, and generally unobtrusive. He hated them for that.

Thibault began to spend his time alone, which he supposed was a return to tradition. Summer was dead and gone, and it had taken friendship with it. Thibault worked two nights a month and spent the rest of his time in his room reading the books he'd always meant to get to at some point. Petals turned into flowers turned into large clumps that Thibault soon began to think of as corsages. His coughs became drier and drier until he was practically blowing flowers out of himself with a hairdryer. Thibault tried not to think about what this meant for the surface area of his lungs.

He might as well tell Nate now. At the rate things were going, it wasn't going to be long until they'd be back down to five Zeroes. Thibault thought back to what Flicker had told him on the Fourth of July. He was confident he'd be forgotten soon after his death. Not to mention, hiding the flowers from everyone else was growing increasingly difficult. They seemed to never stop coming, and if Thibault himself wasn't horribly aware of every excruciating second he spent on his knees forcing plant material out of his throat—sometimes even forced to pull particularly stubborn stems inch by inch out of his throat—he'd almost believe they came out of him like magic. A river of delicate blooms exiting his throat in a blue stream.

In the end, his hand was forced by Nate. Thibault was nowhere to be found when a fight broke out in the Dish, and Nate went searching, as he was wont to do, for his invisible bouncer. And he found Thibault hunched over in the alley thinking that maybe, just maybe, this one would be the one to kill him. It took a moment for Thibault to even remember he was supposed to be breathing after he'd coughed up all of the flowers he could. The plants were finally settling into his lungs properly. Every breath was a reminder that they were now permanent fixtures of his body, their roots comingling with his muscle and connective tissue in a nauseous manner.

Nate knelt next to him while Thibault struggled to catch his breath. It seemed increasingly likely that he never would. "I had no idea," Nate whispered. He clearly wanted to ask who it was—had more than a worried interest in the petals—but was holding back from being rude for once. Good.

"Better that way," Thibault gasped between what felt like thimblefuls of air. The November air made him shudder with cold; he probably had a fever again.

"There are treatments, you know. You could live a little longer, manage your pain. I'd pay. Money's no object."

"No doctors. No hospitals." Not like that again.

Nate sighed. He knew as well as anyone that Thibault couldn't be forced to do anything. "Then you shouldn't be on the dance floor, Anon. You'll get hurt." Nate put his arm around Thibault's shoulders. It seemed like a vaguely brotherly gesture, and Thibault almost wept while spitting out petals. He missed his family. He wished he could be with them before he died. Agapis pneumonia came with psychological symptoms like increased loneliness, Thibault told himself. It didn't help.

And then he was weeping in earnest and Nate gripped him closer, not understanding that he was making it worse. Nate spoke softly, like Thibault was already dead. "The others should know. Even with your anonymity, Thibault, we'd remember you. We'll spend our whole lives looking for you if we forget why you're gone." It made pragmatic sense, even if Thibault wanted to yell at the idiot who's only experience with the disease was a stashed mouthful of rose petals to impress a girl in fifth grade that this was _his_ death, damn it.

Telling the other Zeroes was as difficult as he imagined. Nate had arranged their chairs in a loose circle in the middle of the Dish, and Thibault felt like he was in some kind of support group for dying lovers. There were the expected consolations, though no tears, which Thibault supposed was fair. Death took a while to really sink in, even for the person it was happening to. And for someone like Thibault, there was a good chance it'd slip their minds before the day was over. Sad, far-off thoughts like that were so hard to hold on to, anyway. The mind protected itself from that kind of thing.

The thought of being mostly forgotten afterwards didn't make confronting his own death any easier. Saying it out loud seemed to make it _real_. It was too close to his memories of dying in the hospital; the constant feeling of suffocation inevitably reminded Thibault of that terrible dehydration. Except this time he wouldn't be able to save himself. The hospital had taught him to never rely on anyone but himself, that attachment led to suffering. This told him that someone else had to save Thibault from himself and, well, that attachment led to very physical suffering. He supposed attachment to life was about the same thing. Death was, after all, a natural part of life.

So he busied himself by accepting sympathies that he was already numb to and promising everyone through shaky breaths that he'd spend some time with them before he went and generally playing the part of someone that was going to be missed. The tension in the room buzzed between them; Thibault knew Nate could see it too. No one wanted to ask the question that everyone wanted the answer to. Who _was_ it? Flicker hugged him and promised that, as one of the people who remembered him the most, she would keep him company more often. Thibault felt strangely zen throughout the whole thing. He was glad Flicker's obvious attraction had never developed into something more; there wasn't anything sadder than a pneumatic love triangle. It was difficult to stay detached, though, when Kelsie burst into tears and said that she "should have noticed something, oh my God!". In the end, Thibault felt it was better that she hadn't. Ethan stood off to the side of the group, pale and shuddering when Thibault had another attack during the meeting and had to excuse himself to slowly die in private.

Which was why it was a bit of a shock when Ethan came up to Thibault's room later, long after everyone else had gone home, or to their room, in Kelsie's case.

Thibault was struggling through the collected works of James Baldwin, half because he was too exhausted to focus on the book properly and half because he had to brush petals off the book every few pages. They were dry and clean, at least, so the book wasn't ruined.

Ethan entered without knocking. He stood in the doorway for a short while, then bent down to pick up a few of the flowers on the floor. The delicate petals were pulverised between his fingers. He looked uncharacteristically intense. No, Thibault realised, _incensed_ was the word for it. "Who is it."

"Ethan," Thibault wheezed, his chest suddenly tight, "What's done is—"

"Who _is_ it?" Ethan's face turned bright red. "Is it someone I know? Is it one of us? Is it—No," he cut himself off. "It doesn't matter who it is, because the second you tell me who it is I'm going to find them, and... and I'll _make_ them say it! The voice can make people say anything!" He strode over the carpet of flowers Thibault was too tired to clean up anymore. Before Thibault knew it, Ethan was sitting on his bed and had gripped him hard by both arms to turn Thibault to face him. Ethan's sight-line crackled wildly between the two of them. There were practically electric shocks coming off of where he was gripping Thibault hard enough to bruise.

"Come on, Teebo." He shook Thibault a little too hard for his weak lungs to bear, and a volley of petals fluttered between them as Thibault had another coughing fit. He pushed Ethan's hands off of him and arched, blossoms building up in his hands and trickling through his fingers onto the bed. The flowers just kept coming, and it wasn't long before Thibault had coughed up what felt like an entire field of them. Months of coughing up flowers had worn his gag reflex down into nothing; Thibault's windpipe relaxed and the bundles of forget-me-nots practically poured out of him, getting bloodier as they went. Everything he'd coughed up for Ethan thus far could have replaced the ostentatious display of flowers in the Magnifique's lobby, and then some.

The room was silent except for Thibault's ragged, slightly wet breathing. His recovery just got slower every time. Seeing his own blood with that sickening shade of blue every time he coughed didn't help, either. He wiped off his mouth and swallowed a few times trying to get the taste of blood out of his mouth.

"Forget-me-nots..." Ethan whispered. "That's so..." Sad. Pathetic. Frankly impossible. Even Ethan didn't feel the need to finish his comment on how useless those words for Thibault.

"It's no good," said Thibault. "You can't make someone love a person they can't remember. It's just cruel."

"They'll learn! I started remembering you!"

"No, Ethan." Thibault meant to be forceful, but he sounded weary even to his own ears. "You _forgot me_."

The truth in Thibault's barb gave Ethan some pause. Thibault wished Ethan would just forget him again and leave Thibault to die in peace, but couldn't bring himself to cut the connection off. The connection in question flared. When Ethan spoke again, it was with a familiar and unwelcome cadence. "Thibault, if you die, then it's only a matter of time for me."

"That's the voice."

Ethan looked embarrassed. Then he met Thibault's eye, defiant. "It's still true. If you die then there's never any chance I'll get better. Even if you won't try for yourself, you could try for me."

For the first time in months, Thibault struggled to breathe for a reason entirely unrelated to the flowers in his windpipe. The voice lied. It was what it did.

But Ethan was a terrible liar.

"If," Thibault began, " _If_ you are sick with anything other than a cold, it's Kelsie. And she'd give you a chance if only you'd talk to her."

"Kelsie's pretty cute, but pretty cute doesn't kill you. It's got to be love." Ethan chewed on his lip. Thibault could almost hear—or imagined he heard— flowers rustling as Ethan breathed. "And I coughed my first petals last night. You started avoiding me after I followed Kelsie. I guess you were mad at me or something and... you know, that hurt." Ethan smiled. "It hurt a lot. So I think I know how you feel."

"And..." He took a deep breath. Yes, definitely rattling. How had Thibault never noticed it before? His own breath came fast and easy, easier than Thibault remembered it being in some time. There wasn't a hint of fluttering petals on his exhale, and his lungs suddenly expanded like they were meant to, seemingly free of roots and shrubbery. "I think, even if you end up never feeling the same way, that if one of us has to die from stupid lover's lung, I'd rather it not be you." Ethan pursed his lips and looked wistfully into Thibault's eyes. "It's Flicker, isn't it? I kind of figured."

Thibault's hands were shaking where he was gripping them in front of him, as if in prayer. He almost lost his head entirely and kissed Ethan right then. An inch from Ethan's lips, however, he thought better of it and turned for the cheek. Just in case.

"I hope," Ethan gasped, "that means what I think it means."

"Do I have to spell it out for you?"

Ethan grinned. "I never was a good speller."

And then Thibault kissed him properly, crumpling unneeded forget-me-nots underfoot and winding his hands up to rest on Ethan's face. It was like an answer to a question he'd been asking for months. Thibault knew, of course, that the flowers did not magically disappear upon confession like they did in romance novels.

But when he pulled away from Ethan, Thibault didn't even have to remember to breathe. Another thing romance novels got wrong, he guessed.  
  



End file.
